*     JUN  231910      *^ 


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Divisioa      JD^Cbbo 


Sectioa 


ilEotietn  BeUgtoujS  i^toblemiS 

EDITED  BY 

AMBROSE   WHITE   VERNON 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 


BY 


JAMES    MOFFATT,  D.  D. 

AUTHOR  OF  "THE  HISTORICAL  NEW  TESTAMENT" 


BOSTON   AND   NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 

(Cbe  (tttier^ibe  ptt0  Cambridge 

1910 


COPYRIGHT,   IQIO,  BY  JAMES  MOFFATT 
ALL   RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Published  February  iqio 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

I 

Genesis^  says  Tertullian  in  the  fifth  book 
of  his  treatise  against  Marcion,  —  Genesis 
promised  me  Paul  long"  ago.  For,  he  adds 
(playing  upon  a  Latin  rendering  of  Genesis 
xlix  :  27),  TV  hen  Jacob  was  pronouncing 
typical  and  prophetic  blessings  over  his 
sons^  he  turned  to  Benjamin  and  said, 
''  Benjamin  is  a  ravening  wolf  ^  in  the 
morning  he  shall  devour  his  prey,,  but 
towards  evening  he  shall  provide  foodP 
He  foresaw  that  Paul  would  spring  from 
Benjamin,  "  a  ravening  wolf,  devouring 
his  prey  in  the  morning'''^  :  that  is,  in 
early  life  he  would  lay  waste  the  flocks 
of  God  as  a  persecutor  of  the  churches  ; 
then  towards  evening  he  would  provide 

I 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

food:  that  isy  in  his  declining  years  he 
would  train  the  sheep  of  Christ  as  a  teacher 
of  the  nations.  This  fanciful  exegesis  of 
the  African  father  brings  out  three  salient 
features  in  the  career  and  character  of  Paul. 
{a)  He  was  a  full-blooded  Jew  by  birth, 
who  was  keen  upon  his  national  faith;  (3) 
his  religious  experience  fell  into  two  sharply 
divided  periods  ;  and  (c)  his  services  to 
the  great  Christian  mission  were  rendered 
during  the  late  afternoon  of  his  life.  He  did 
not  begin  to  write  the  letters  by  which  he 
is  best  known  till  he  had  been  a  Christian 
for  about  twenty  years,  and  he  was  over 
forty  when  he  inaugurated  the  Gentile  pro- 
paganda in  Asia  Minor  and  Europe. 

The  first  of  these  features  acquires  its 
true  significance  in  the  light  of  the  second. 
Paul  received  a  sound  and  strict  religious 
training,  first  from  his  parents  at  Tarsus, 
the  capital  of  Cilicia,  and  then  at  Jerusalem, 
whither  he  was  sent  to  study  under  Gama- 

2 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

liel.  The  rabban  belonged  like  himself  to 
the  clan  of  Benjamin;  he  was  distinguished 
not  only  on  account  of  his  reverence  for  the 
Law,  but  by  his  comparatively  liberal  atti- 
tude to  Greek  culture,  —  a  combination  of 
qualities  which  should  relieve  us  from  the 
unreal  dilemma  of  referring  his  great  pupil's 
Judaism  to  the  Hellenistic  type  or  to  the 
rabbinic.  Unmistakable  traces  of  both  ap- 
pear in  Paul's  theology,  but  the  paramount 
trait  of  his  character  was  its  Pharisaism. 
With  the  Sadducees  he  was  totally  out  of 
sympathy.  His  deeply  religious  nature  in- 
clined him  to  the  Pharisaic  traditions  of  his 
family,  for  Pharisaism  was  one  of  those 
religious  schools  which  command  and  wel- 
come moral  enthusiasm.  I iv as  circumcised 
on  the  eighth  day^  he  writes  in  his  old  age; 
/  belonged  to  the  race  of  Israel^  to  the 
tribe  of  Benjamin '^  I  was  the  Hebrew  son 
of  Hebrew  parents;  in  the  matter  of  the 
Law  I  was  a  Pharisee;  as  for  zeal^  I  per^ 

3 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

secuted  the  church'^  tested  by  righteousness 
within  the  limits  of  the  Latv^  I  proved 
blameless,  .  .  ,  Tou  have  heard  of  my  erst- 
-while  career  as  a  few,  how  excessively  I 
persecuted  and  ravaged  the  church  of  God ^ 
and  how  I  outstripped  many  of  my  con- 
temp07^aries  in  Jewish  pursuits^  intensely 
zealous  as  I  was  for  the  traditions  of  my 
fathers.  Such  words  enable  us  to  slip  in- 
side the  soul  of  Paul  in  his  pre-Christian 
days.  From  the  very  outset  he  was  proud 
of  his  religion,  with  the  moral  pride  which 
makes  a  man  feel,  especially  in  his  early 
years,  that  no  sacrifices  should  be  too  costly 
for  the  sake  of  the  great  cause.  Whatever 
he  believed,  he  believed  ardently  and  thor- 
oughly. His  was  one  of  those  natures  which 
are  not  satisfied  unless  in  working  out  and 
thinking  out  their  faith.  Gamaliel  had  a 
reputation  for  mildness  and  moderation, 
but  his  brilliant  young  pupil  flung  himself 
with  fanatical  zeal  into  the  task  of  stamp- 

4 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

ing  out  the  new  heresy  of  the  Nazarenes. 
He  must  have  recognized  in  its  messianic 
belief  a  spirit  which  was  fatal  to  the  essen- 
tial principles  of  Judaism.  The  primitive 
community  of  the  adherents  of  Jesus  at  Je- 
rusalem might  frequent  the  temple  and  con- 
tinue to  act  as  if  their  new  faith  were  com- 
patible with  the  worship  and  tenets  of  the 
Law,  but  Paul's  stringent  logic,  fostered  by 
his  keen  religious  sense,  penetrated  to  the 
inward  significance  of  this  new  movement. 
The  Nazarenes  confessed,  yesus  is  Lord, 
Paul's  watchword  was,  yesus  is  anathema. 
He  saw  nothing  but  blasphemy  in  the 
attempt  to  connect  the  glorious  messianic 
hope  of  Israel  with  the  career  of  a  Galilean 
peasant  who  had  perished  ignominiously 
by  the  hands  of  the  Roman  authorities. 

The  vigour  with  which  the  Palestinian 
church  was  harried  had  driven  a  number 
of  refugees,  after  the  martyrdom  of  Ste- 
phen, into  the  far  north,  not  only  to  Syrian 

5 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

Antioch,  but  eastward  to  Damascus,  in  the 
Nabataean   domain.     Paul    determined   to 
follow  up  the  latter.  His  zeal  was  unslaked, 
and  he  succeeded  in  obtaining  permission 
and  authority  from  the  high  priest  to  arrest 
any  Nazarenes  whom  he  could  discover  in 
the    synagogues  of   Damascus.   The   idea 
was  that  he  should  pursue  the  same  short 
and  easy  way  with  these  dissenters  as  had 
already  proved  effective.  The  next  news^ 
which   reached   the  authorities,  however,  \ 
was  that   the   mission   had    collapsed;   to  \ 
their  disgust  and  amazement,  they  learned   \ 
that  their  brilliant  young  agent  had  become    J 
a  renegade. 

The  object  of  his  immediate  retiral  into 
the  lonely  territory  east  or  south  of  Da- 
mascus was  to  think  out,  unmolested  by  his 
former  allies,  the  bearings  of  his  new  posi- 
tion. What  had  made  him  a  Christian,  he 
invariably  confessed,  was  a  vision  of  the 
Lord  Jesus.  And  the  same  vision,  which 

6 


/ 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

had  arrested  him  with  a  flash  of  light  on 
pagan  soil,  made  him  conscious  that  he  had 
a  special  vocation  to  the  Gentiles.  We  do 
not  possess  sufficient  data  for  any  psycho- 
logical account  of  the  crisis.  But  such  vi- 
sions do  not  happen  in  a  vacuum.  The  origin  ^ 
of  Paul's  Christianity  was  something  more 
than  a  sunstroke  or  a  fit  of  epilepsy  at  noon 
upon  the  road  to  Damascus ;  it  was  a  reve- 
lation, mediated  by  some  profound  internal 
conflict  which  must  have  been  going  on 
within  his  soul.  We  may  easily  make  the  mis- 
take of  reading  too  much  into  the  words 
which  came  to  him  in  the  vision, — Saul^ 
Saul,  why  art  thou  persecuting  me?  It  is 
ill  for  thee  to  hick  against  the  goad,  —  but 
they  suggest  that  his  harrying  of  the  Naz- 
arenes  had  been  one  of  those  meritorious 
actions  in  vindication  of  the  Law  by  which 
he  hoped  to  please  God,  yet  in  which  he 
was  conscious  that  he  did  not  gain  peace 
of  mind;  his  recent  vehemence  may  have 

7 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

been  also  due  in  part  to  the  fact  that  he 
was  fighting  down  some  secret  misgivings, 
occasioned  or  at  any  rate  deepened  by  the 
impression  which  the  people  he  was  attack- 
ing made  upon  his  mind.  It  is  natural  to 
think  of  Stephen  in  this  connexion.  Stephen, 
it  is  true,  did  not  proclaim  the  mission  to 
the  Gentiles,  nor  did  he  assail  the  validity 
of  the  Law.  But  his  reading  of  Jewish  his- 
tory as  a  long  obstinate  resistance  to  the 
Spirit  of  God  tallies  with  the  words  which 
we  have  just  quoted,  and,  although  Paul 
never  ranks  Stephen's  dying  vision  of  the 
Lord  among  the  appearances  of  the  risen 
Christ,  it  was  probably  an  incident  which 
sank  deep  into  his  soul.  Some  uneasiness 
of  this  kind,  implying  that  Paul  was  brood- 
ing secretly  over  the  meaning  of  the  new 
faith,  together  with  a  sense  of  moral  de- 
spair which  grew  upon  him  the  more  con- 
scientious he  strove  to  be,  may  be  conjec- 
tured to  have  lain  under  the  vision  near 

8 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

Damascus.  While  they  did  not  produce  it, 
they  created  an  atmosphere  for  it.  Paul 
himself  naturally  calls  the  change  abrupt 
and  sudden,  just  as  he  emphasizes  its  divine 
reality,  upon  the  other  hand,  by  excluding 
all  human  influences.  But  this  does  nob 
imply  necessarily  that  he  had  been  uncon- 
scious till  that  moment  of  any  mysterious 
leaning  towards  the  Nazarene  faith  or  of 
any  questionings  about  his  own  position 
before  God,  any  more  than  it  rules  out  the 
possibility  that,  like  Wesley,  he  was  helped 
in  his  early  Christian  hours  by  pious  men, 
whose  names  were  never  known.  Probably 
Ananias  of  Damascus  was  one  of  the  latter. 
Whatever  process  of  reflection  Paul 
went  through  in  Arabia,  he  left  his  tem- 
porary seclusion  with  the  characteristic 
resolve  that  he  would  consecrate  the  prose- 
l37tizing  zeal  of  a  Pharisee  to  the  task  of 
spreading  the  message  of  a  gospel  which 
cut  up  Pharisaism  by  the  roots.  Unfortu- 

9 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

nately,  his  movements  at  this  point  become 
rather  obscure.  We  learn,  however,  that 
two  or  three  years  after  his  conversion, 
finding  neither  Damascus  nor  Jerusalem 
a  safe  or  congenial  sphere  of  work,  he 
retired  to  Syria  and  Cilicia.  There  he 
laboured  for  nearly  fourteen  years.  The 
account  in  Acts  xi-xiv,  which  rests  on 
some  reliable  Antiochene  traditions,  nar- 
rates that  during  the  latter  part  of  the 
time  he  took  an  active  share  in  the  mission 
at  Antioch,  the  capital  of  Syria,  which  had 
become  the  headquarters  of  an  aggressive 
and  expansive  Gentile  mission.  But  if  he 
wrote  any  epistles  during  the  period,  none 
has  survived.  These  long  years  must  have 
been  pregnant  and  formative;  they  cover 
his  first  mission-sphere,  and  it  is  a  distinct 
loss  to  be  deprived  of  any  records  from  his 
own  pen  which  would  throw  light  upon 
the  inward  and  outward  course  of  events. 
Titus  was  one  of  his  chief  converts,  but 

ID 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

unluckily  the  Book  of  Acts  ignores  him 
altogether,  as  it  ignores  the  first  two  thirds 
of  these  fourteen  years.  We  may  feel  cer- 
tain, however,  that  this  protracted  mis- 
sion, especially  in  its  Arabian  and  pre- 
Antioch  years,  did  not  represent  any  slow 
process  by  means  of  which  Paul  became 
gradually  conscious  of  what  his  mission 
and  commission  to  the  Gentiles  involved. 
If  there  was  any  uncertainty  upon  the 
right  of  Gentiles  to  believe  in  Jesus  with- 
out becoming  Jews,  it  was  among  the 
primitive  apostles  at  Jerusalem,  who  still 
shared  the  idea  that  the  object  of  Jesus 
was  to  regenerate  Israel  primarily  in  order 
to  inherit  the  joys  and  glories  of  his  mes- 
sianic reign. 

If  one  test  of  a  vision  is  not  only  that  it 
transforms  the  life  of  the  man  who  receives 
it,  but  inspires  and  enables  him  to  effect  a 
similar  change  in  the  life  of  others,  Paul's 
experience  of  Jesus  Christ  answered  to  this 

II 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

criterion.  From  the  first  he  was  conscious 
of  a  vocation.  He  who  set  me  apart  Jrom 
my  very  birth  and  called  me  by  his  grace 
ivas  pleased  to  reveal  to  me  his  Son^  that 
I  might  bring  the  good  news  of  him  to  the 
fiations.  Elsewhere,  after  speaking  of  the 
new  world  which  faith  in  Christ  meant  and 
made  for  him, — when  a  man  comes  to  be  in 
Christy  there  is  a  fresh  creation^  —  he  at 
once  adds,  and  it  is  all  of  God,  who  re- 
conciled  us  to  himself  through  Jesus  Christ 
and  commissioned  us  to  be  ministers  of  the 
reconciliation,  namely,  to  proclaim  that 
in  Christ  God  was  reconciling  the  world 
to  himself  instead  of  reckoning  men^s 
trespasses  against  them,  and  that  he  has 
entrusted  us  with  the  message  of  recon- 
ciliation. Words  like  these,  in  which  we 
get  the  man's  whole  life  distilled,  could  not 
have  come  from  an  ordinary  believer.  Ha(l 
Paul  been  content  to  remain  a  Jewish  ^ 
Christian  after  the  type  of  James  or  Peter, 

12 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

his  career,  like  that  of  Christianity,  would 
have  been  very  different.  But  there  is  not 
enough  evidence  to  prove  that  Paulinism 
represents  the  outcome  of  his  mature  reflec- 
tions, after  he  had  emancipated  himself  from 
any  such  Jewish  Christian  stage.  Three  in- 
cidental allusions  have  sometimes  been 
taken  to  imply  an  immature  phase  of  Paul's 
Christian  life,  in  practice  as  well  as  in  the- 
ory: viz.  {a)  If  I  were  still  pleasing- men, 
/'Would  not  be  Chris  fs  servant. "^  (3)  If  I 
still  preach  circumcision^  ivhy  am  I  still 
persecuted?  *  (c)  Even  though  we  did  know 
Christ  after  the  flesh,  we  no  longer  know 
him,  in  this  way}  None  of  these  passages, 
however,  will  support  the  inference  in  ques- 
tion. The  first  means,  "  If,  after  all  that  has 
happened  in  my  life,  I  were  still  trying  to 
curry  favour  with  people,  instead  of  being 
single-minded,  I  would  be  no  true  servant 
of  Christ.  But  I  do  not  serve  two  masters." 

*Gal.  i:io.  *Gal.  v:ii.  '2Cor.  v:i6. 

13 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

The  supposition  is  purely  hypothetical. 
Whether  men  means  the  apostles  at  Jeru- 
salem or  men  in  general,  the  sense  of  the 
words  is  the  same.  In  the  latter  case,  the 
insinuation  which  Paul  repudiates  would 
be  parallel  to  that  behind  (<5),  where  again 
he  is  retorting  upon  those  who  brought 
up  his  past  against  him.  Here  too  it  was  not 
his  pre-Christian  past  but  his  conduct  as 
a  Christian  apostle,  particularly  his  recent 
circumcision  of  Timotheus,'  which  lent 
plausibility  to  the  charge.  This  concession 
was  misrepresented  by  his  opponents.  They 
declared,  not  that  Paul  secretly  considered 
circumcision  to  mean  a  higher  stage  or 
level  of  Christian  experience,  from  which 
he  sought  to  exclude  Christians  of  Gentile 
birth,  but  that  in  his  heart  of  hearts  he 
really  believed  circumcision  to  be  a  vital 
element  in  the  Christian  praxis,  and  that 
he  tried  to  persuade  the  bulk  of  Gentile 

*  Acts  xvi :  3. 

H 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

Christians  it  was  unessential  simply  in  order 
to  gain  their  gratitude  by  arranging  to  ex- 
empt them  from  a  painful  and  humiliating 
rite.  This  would  be  time-serving,  Paul  re- 
torts, and  time-servers,  whose  chief  end  is 
popularity,  are  not  served  as  I  am  being 
served !  If  it  is  m}^  usual  custom  to  preach 
a  Christianized  Pharisaism,  based  on  the 
observance  of  Jewish  ritual  instead  of  faith 
in  a  crucified  Christ,  why  am  I  persecuted 
still  by  people  who  resent  the  message  of 
the  Cross?  The  third  passage  (<:)  is  more 
difficult.  Here  Paul  is  not  replying  to  any 
sneering  comment  upon  his  consistency, 
but  contrasting  two  aspects  of  Christ  which 
had  presented  themselves  to  his  mind.  One 
of  these,  that  after  the  fleshy  has  been  in- 
terpreted to  mean  a  personal  knowledge  of 
Jesus  during  his  life-time  on  earth,  such  as 
the  twelve  had  enjoyed.  But  it  is  more  than 
doubtful  if  Paul  ever  came  in  contact  with 
Jesus  at  Jerusalem.  Besides,  had  this  been 

IS 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

his  meaning,  we  should  have  expected  him 
to  say  yesus  instead  of  Christy  and,  at  other 
points,  where  an  allusion  to  such  know- 
ledge would  have  come  in  with  telling 
effect,  he  is  silent.  The  knowledge  of 
Christ  ^xifter  the  flesh  is  probably  the  mes- 
sianic belief  of  Pharisaic  theology  such  as 
Paul  had  shared  in  his  pre-Christian  days. 
The  context  of  the  passage,  with  its  con- 
trast between  the  inside  and  the  outside 
view  of  Christ,  militates  against  the  idea 
that  he  is  referring  to  some  earlier  period  or 
phase  of  his  Christian  experience,  during 
which  he  still  viewed  Jesus  under  the  cat- 
egories of  this  Pharisaic  messianism.  The 
words  are  an  aside,  and  like  all  asides  they 
convey  a  meaning  which  is  not  easily 
caught.  But  their  import  is,  "  Though  as  a 
Jew  I  knew  this  type  of  messiah,  —  a  na- 
tional hero  or  official  figure,  robed  in  ex- 
clusiveness  and  external  glory,  —  yet  now, 
as  a  Christian,  I  know  a  messiah  who  died 

i6 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

for  alW^  The  whole  passage  confirms  the 
impression  that  in  Galatians  i:  15-17  Paul 
is  not  reading  back  into  his  initial  expe- 
rience of  Jesus  Christ  the  richer  memo- 
ries and  ampler  deposit  of  the  intervening 
years.  From  the  very  outset,  a  better 
knowledge  of  Christ's  nature  had  shone 
upon  him.  The  crisis  of  his  conversion 
had  been  the  dawn  of  a  new  world.  It  was 
as  if  God  had  said,  Let  there  be  light j  and 
there  was  lights  The  conception  of  Jesus 
as  the  messiah  who  had  suffered  on  the 
cross  and  risen  from  the  dead  was  a  vision 
which  meant  not  only  a  revision  of  all  his 
previous  messianic  ideas  but  a  re-casting 
of  his  nature;  indeed,  this  radical  change, 
in  which  his  whole  nature  was  melted 
and  moulded  by  the  power  of  the  Lord, 
completely  altered  his  religious  opinions 
about  messiah  or  the  Christ,  and  the  latter 
change  began  from  the  moment  when  he 

*  2  Cor.  iv  :  6. 

17 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

stumbled  to  his  feet  on  the  highroad  out- 
side Damascus.  Certainly,  after  he  returned 
from  Arabia,  he  cannot  have  hesitated  for 
a  moment  to  preach  that  the  door  of  faith 
was  open  to  the  Gentiles,  and  that  they  did 
not  require  to  enter  the  church  and  king- 
dom of  God  through  any  postern-gate  of 
circumcision. 

It  was,  in  fact,  the  success  of  the  Gentile 
mission  upon  these  open  principles  which ! 
aroused    the    suspicions    of   the    narrower ; 
Jewish    Christians    in    Jerusalem.     Theiiy 
policy,  if  left  unchallenged,  would  simply 
have    added   another    party,    that    of    the 
Nazarenes,  to  Judaism.   Their  interference 
with  the  church  at  Antioch,  however,  pre- 
cipitated   the    issue    between  Jewish    and 
Gentile    Christianity.  Whatever   authority 
they  had  or  pretended   to  have  from  the 
twelve  apostles,  Paul    determined   to    lay 
the  case  before  the  latter.  A  door  must  be 
either  open  or  shut,  and  he  was  resolved 

i8 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

to  settle  once  for  all  the  question  whether 
Gentile  Christians  were  obliged  to  conform 
to  the  Jewish  Torah,  on  pain  of  being  re- 
garded, like  the  uncircumcised  proselytes 
of  Judaism,  as  outsiders,  in  a  more  or  less 
secondary  and  inferior  position. 

The  stricter  Jewish  Christian  party  at 
Jerusalem  did  not  object  to  pagans  becom- 
ing believers  in  Jesus;  they  simply  insisted 
that,  as  the  divine  Torah,  ceremonial  and 
moral,  was  still  obligatory,  such  converts 
must  be  circumcised,  as  Jesus  himself  had  / 
been,  and  be  bound  over  to  observe  the  / 
legal  requirements.  Even  among  the  Jews 
themselves,  at  this  period,  it  was  debated 
whether  circumcision  should  be  enforced 
on  proselytes;  possibly  the  later  idea  that 
messiah's  appearance  would  set  aside  the 
obligations  of  the  Law  was  already  current 
in  some  quarters.  But  in  any  case,  a  strong 
party  in  the  Jerusalem  church  leaned  to  the 
strict  views  of  the  dominant  Pharisaism. 

19 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

No  personal  record  of  the  primitive  apos- 
tles is  extant,  to  show  how  they  felt  on 
the  matter.  The  narrative  in  the  fifteenth 
chapter  of   Acts  is  the   semi-official  and 
later  version  of   a  church    historian  who 
naturally- sought  to  soften  the  sharp  edges 
of  the  original  controversy.  PauPs  account,\ 
in  the  second  chapter  of  Galatians,  states  \ 
the  case  bluntly  from  his  own  standpoint.  ■ 
But  even  the  latter  shows  that  the  leading  j"^ 
apostles  as  a  whole  were  too  large-minded 
to  support  the  narrower  Jewish  Christians  / 
against  Paul.  They  did  not  demur  to  the 
gospel  which  Paul  preached,  that  is,  to  its 
essential  principles  of  faith.  Upon  the  con- 
trary, he  managed  to  persuade  them  that  it 
was  the  gospel,  as  effective  in  his  hands  as 
in  theirs.  The  concordat  ultimately  arrived 
at  was  that  while  James,  Peter,  and  John 
should  prosecute  the  Jewish  Christian  mis- 
sion, Paul  and  Barnabas  were  to   devote 
themselves  to  the  Gentile  Christians.  The 

20 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

respective  spheres  of  operation  were  thus 
delimited  roughly,  in  order  to  avoid  need- 
less friction.  But  the  treaty  involved  the 
toleration  of  Paul's  gospel  to  Gentile  Chris- 
tians, and  in  a  case  like  this,  toleration  of 
practice  was  equivalent  to  a  tacit  recogni- 
tion of  principle.  The  propaganda  of  the 
extreme  anti-Pauline  party  was  check- 
mated. But  the  party  had  other  moves  to 
make;  Paul  soon  found  that  his  difficulties 
were  not  over.  Shortly  afterwards,  Peter 
was  guilty  of  vacillation  during  a  visit  to 
Antioch.  It  was  more  easy  to  agree  to  a 
principle  than  to  act  upon  it  consistently, 
and  while  he  began  by  associating  freely 
with  Gentile  Christians,  nevertheless,  'when 
certain  persons  came  from  J am.es  ^  as  Paul 
contemptuously  put  it,  he  began  to  draw 
bach.  The  plain  sense  of  the  words  is  that 
these  emissaries  of  James  believed,  as  Paul 
believed,  that  they  had  some  authority 
from  James  for  interposing.  What  instruc- 

21 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

tions  they  had,  and  how  far  they  went 
beyond  them,  we  cannot  ascertain.  Paul 
dealt  not  with  them,  but  with  Peter,  as  the 
responsible  authority  on  the  spot.  He 
censured  the  senior  apostle  sharply  for  his 
practical"  opportunism.  What  passed  be- 
tween Paul  and  the  emissaries  of  James  is 
left  untold;  all  we  know  is  that  these  high 
and  hard  churchmen  pursued  him  ever 
afterwards  with  a  counter-mission,  spread- 
ing insinuations  against  his  character,  dis- 
crediting his  authority,  and  impugning  the 
adequacy  of  his  gospel.  Hitherto  his  oppo- 
nents had  been  pagans  and  Jews.  Now, 
throughout  his  second  sphere  of  opera- 
tions, they  included  Christian  Judaists.  If 
the  mission  treaty  of  Jerusalem  was  drawn 
up  with  any  idea  of  removing  Paul  from 
the  danger-zone  of  the  narrower  party,  it 
proved  a  failure.  > 

The  quarrel  at  Antioch  had  another  un-"\  / 
fortunate  result  for  Paul.  It  deprived  him 

22 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

of  his  former  colleague,  Barnabas.  Barna-  \ 
bas  was  of  the  willow  rather  than  of  the  oak 
order,  and  Peter's  bad  example  had  car- 
ried him  away.  Paul  was  not  in  a  mood  to 
be  conciliatory.  He  had  lost  confidence  in 
Barnabas,  and  eventually  chose  Silas  or  Sil- 
vanus,  who  belonged  to  the  more  liberal 
party  in  the  Jerusalem  church,  as  a  coad- 
jutor in  the  new  mission.  For  he  now  was 
planning  a  second  enterprise.  His  range  of 
operations  widened.  The  conception  of  a 
mission  to  the  world  had  fastened  on  his 
imagination,  and  he  went  further  afield  than 
he  had  yet  gone.  After  revisiting  Syria  and 
Cilicia,  he  broke  new  ground  successfully 
in  northern  Galatia,  but  evidently  he  did 
not  feel  free  to  continue  work  in  Asia.  A 
mysterious  attraction  drew  him  west,  and 
eventually  he  started  upon  the  great  mis- 
sion to  Europe,  or  rather  to  Macedonia  and 
Achaia.  The  preliminary  campaign  occu- 
pied nearly  three  years.   When  this  was 

23 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

over,  he  returned  upon  his  track  to  Galatia, 
and  finally  settled  down  for  a  couple  of 
years  at  Ephesus,  where  he  could  keep  in 
touch  with  Asia  and  Europe  for  the  pur- 
pose of  supervising  his  churches  in  these 
regions.  Before  his  last  visit  to  the  Euro- 
pean churches,  he  had  written  the  extant 
letters  to  Thessalonica,  Galatia,  and  Cor- 
inth. The  fruitful  evening,  of  which  Ter- 
tullian  spoke,  had  opened,  so  far  as  the 
ministry  of  writing  was  concerned. 

The  problem  of  a  third  sphere  now 
emerged.  What  was  to  be  his  next  mis- 
sion? Not  the  southern  Mediterranean. 
Egypt  apparently  was  already  being  evan- 
gelized by  other  Christians,  and  Paul's  guid- 
ing principle  was  to  find  virgin  soil  for  his 
gospel.  In  a  letter  to  the  church  of  Rome, 
written  towards  the  end  of  his  European 
mission,  he  summed  up  the  situation  thus: 
From  yerusalem  right  round  to  Illyria  I 
have  fully  preached  the  gospel  of  Christy 

24 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

my  great  aim  being  to  evangelize  places 
where  Chrisfs  name  has  not  been  men- 
tioned^ in  order  to  avoid  building  on 
another  man's  foundation,  Rome  he  had 
often  desired  to  visit.  But  meanwhile  Rome, 
like  Egypt,  had  been  evangelized  by  un- 
known Christians  from  Palestine  or  Egypt. 
The  one  sphere  available  lay  in  Spain  or 
the  western  Mediterranean;  he  felt  shut 
up  to  this  and  proposed  to  travel  thither, 
taking  Rome  on  the  way,  after  he  had  dis- 
charged a  pious  duty  to  the  church  at  Jeru- 
salem by  handing  over  the  proceeds  of  a 
collection  which  his  Galatian,  Macedonian, 
and  Achaian  churches  had  generously  made 
on  behalf  of  the  Christian  poor  within  the 
Jewish  capital.  His  plans,  however,  were 
rudely  interrupted  by  an  outburst  of  Jew- 
ish fanaticism.  He  was  arrested  by  the 
Roman  authorities  at  Jerusalem,  detained 
for  two  years  in  prison  at  Caesarea  Philippi, 
and   finally  despatched   to  be  tried   as  a 

25 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

Roman  citizen  before  the  emperor  at  Rome. 
So  far  as  we  can  learn,  he  was  never  set 
free.  .The  projected  tour  to  Spain  fell 
through.  One  or  two  letters  written  during 
his  imprisonment  survive.  Those  to  the 
churches  of  Colossse  and  Philippi  reveal 
some  of  his  maturer  ideas  upon  the  person 
of  Christ  especially;  the  private  notes,  such 
as  that  to  Philemon  and  the  fragments 
imbedded  in  the  pastoral  Epistles,  are  of 
purely  personal  interest.  Otherwise,  no  reli- 
able traditions  as  to  his  fortunes  in  Rome 
have  been  preserved,  and  even  Luke's 
record  of  the  events  between  the  arrest  in 
Jerusalem  and  the  arrival  in  Rome  leaves 
several  serious  lacuncB,  A  mist  gathers 
round  the  end  as  well  as  round  the  opening 
of  the  apostle's  life.  All  we  know  is  that 
he  must  have  been  put  to  death  under  Nero 
about  the  middle  of  the  seventh  decade. 


26 


II 

The  history  of  primitive  Christianity  has 
been  sometimes  written  as  if  it  were  a 
Pauline  epic.  Paul  is  by  far  the  greatest 
personality  known  to  us  within  the  church 
of  the  first  century;  it  had  no  leader,  no 
evangelist,  no  thinker,  like  him.  But  it 
would  be  unhistorical,  for  example,  to  iden- 
tify Gentile  Christianity  with  Pauline  Chris- 
tianity, any  more  than  the  primitive  church 
with  Jewish  Christianity,  or  to  assume 
that,  because  Paul's  Epistles  precede  the 
Gospels,  to  which  alone,  in  point  of  size 
and  value,  they  rank  second,  they  there- 
fore reflect  the  dim,  common,  central  view 
of  Christianity  as  it  was  preached  and 
lived  throughout  the  early  church.  There 
was  a  distinctive  stamp  of  thought  and  style 
in  Paul's  Epistles.  He  was  the  first  theolo-  /" 

27 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

gian  of  the  faith,  the  master-mind  of  his  age 
within  the  Christian  church.  But  while  an 
original  genius  has  his  own  contribution  of 
independent  insight  to  offer,  he  does  not 
ignore  the  truths  which  his  contemporaries 
have  already  recognized.  He  either  repeats^ 
them  in  his  own  way  or  brings  out  their* 
unsuspected  significance,  and  one  problem 
for  later  ages  is  to  determine  how  far  he 
transcends  the  environment  to  which  he  is 
indebted  and  of  which  he  must  be  in  one 
sense  representative.  This  is  the  question 
which  we  are  bound  to  ask  ourselves  as  we 
confront  the  appearance  of  Paul  and  Paul- 
inism  within  the  primitive  church.  The 
following  pages  are  an  attempt  to  state  it, 
rather  than  to  answer  it,  in  bare  outline. 

The  safest  temper  in  which  to  enter 
upon  such  a  survey  is  a  thoroughgoing 
scepticism  of  all  historical  reconstructions 
which  leave  the  early  Christian  period  like 
a  neatly  coloured  map,  with  the  dominant 

28 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

spheres  of  Paulinism,  Jewish  Christianity, 
and  so  forth,  spaced  out  rigidly.  The  prob- 
lem is  too  complex,  we  might  almost  say 
that  it  is  too  human,  for  solutions  of  this 
kind.  Assuming,  however,  as  we  must,  that 
Paul's  conception  of  the  gospel  had  a  cachet 
of  its  own  which  entitles  us  to  call  his 
method  of  statement  by  the  convenient 
term  of  "  Paulinism,"  let  us  try  to  gauge 
very  briefly  what  seems  to  have  been  most 
characteristic  and  distinctive  in  his  preach- 
ing. 

It  goes  without  saying  that  he  was  not 
the  first  to  proclaim  that  Jesus  Christ  was 
the  one  hope  for  men.  Before  he  had  ceased 
to  be  a  pupil  of  Gamaliel,  the  primitive 
Christians  at  Jerusalem  had  confessed  that 
there  is  no  other  nmne  under  heaven 
whereby  -we  must  be  saved,  Paul  was  not 
even  the  first  to  preach  the  gospel  to  Gen- 
tiles, though  he  was  the  first  to  do  so  on  a 
large  scale  and  with  a  thorough  grasp  of  all 

29 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

that  it  involved.  He  was  not  the  first  to 
connect  the  death  and  resurrection  of  Jesus 
with  the  forgiveness  of  sins.  This  formed 
part  of  the  common  gospel  preached 
throughout  the  early  church.  /  handed  on 
to  you^  he  told  the  Christians  at  Corinth, 
first  of  all  that  ivhich  I  myself  had  re- 
ceived :  namely ^  that  Christ  died  for  our 
sins  according  to  the  scriptures  (i.  e.  of 
the  Old  Testament),  and  that  he  -was  bur- 
ied^ and  that  he  rose  on  the  third  day  ac- 
cording to  the  scriptures^  and  that  he  was 
seen  by  Cephas,  then  by  the  twelve ,  after 
that  he  was  seen  by  above  five  hundred 
brothers  at  once,  the  majority  of  whom  are 
alive  to  this  day,  though  some  sleep  in 
death y  after  that  he  was  seen  by  fames, 
then  by  all  the  apostles,  and  finally  by 
myself  too,  .  .  .  Be  it  I  then  or  they,  such 
is  what  we  preach  and  such  was  your  be- 
lief  It  is  curious  and  at  the  same  time 
unfortunate  that  the  three  specific  refer- 

30 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

ences  to  my  gospel  in  the  Pauline  litera- 
ture throw  very  little  light  upon  the  prob- 
lem of  the  relationship  between  what  Paul 
received  and  what  he  originated.  Romans 
ii:  17  does  not  reflect  a  distinctive  idea  of 
Paul;  neither  does  Romans  xvi :  25,  even 
if  it  is  accepted  as  a  genuine  word  of  the 
apostle,  while  the  Paulinist  who  wrote 
2  Timothy  ii :  8  (see  i  Timothy  i:  11) 
simply  echoes  Romans  i :  3,  4.  The  gen- 
eral impression  left  by  these  passages  is, 
as  we  might  expect,  that  the  characteris- 
tic traits  of  Paul's  gospel  were  visible  in 
what  he  preached  about  Jesus  Christ. 
What  stamped  his  Christianity  as  his  own' 
was  his  estimate  of  the  person  and  work  of  j^ 
Jesus  as  the  Son  of  God.  Even  his  ethi- 
cal conceptions  do  not  differentiate  him  so 
markedly  from  the  primitive  church  as  his 
doctrinal.  For  one  thing,  his  ethic  at  bottom 
is  usually  in  line  with  that  of  Jesus  as  we 
find  it  reflected  in  the  earliest  traditions  of 

31 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

the  Palestinian  church,  and  for  another 
thing,  his  ethic  is  simply  the  application 
and  issue  of  that  faith  in  Jesus  Christ  which 
supplied  him  with  material  for  the  state- 
ment and  enforcement  of  moral  obliga- 
tions. Paulinism,  in  short,  was  the  outcome! 
of  the  apostle's  attempt  to  think  out  fori  / 
himself  the  relations  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christi^ 
to  God,  the  Law,  the  universe,  and  thd 
church.  His  interpretation  draws  upon  sev-rx 
eral  sources,  which  are  more  or  less  visi- 
ble. One  is  the  piety  and  prophecies  of  the 
Old  Testament.  Another  is  his  Pharisaic 
theology,  with  its  belief  in  angels,  in  the 
resurrection,  in  judgment,  in  inspiration, 
and  so  forth.  Another  lies  in  such  ideas  of 
paganism,  determinism,  natural  religion, 
etc.,  as  were  familiar  to  him  from  religious 
literature  like  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon,  or 
in  conceptions  such  as  are  familiar  to  us,  at 
any  rate,  in  the  pages  of  his  contemporary, 
Philo.  Popular  Stoicism  and  the  mysteries  u^ 

32 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

may  also  be  felt  vibrating  through  one  or 
two  sections  of  his  system.  But  the  su- 
preme source  lay  in  a  vivid  personal  expe- 
rience of  Jesus  Christ,  as  he  verified  that 
in  himself  and  in  the  lives  of  others.  Amid 
the  changing,  ranging  fancies  of  the  age, 
which  swayed  from  one  form  of  mytho- 
logy or  ritual  to  another,  he  carried  steadily  ^/^ 
■vsrhat  he  termed  the  mind  of  Christy  his 
consciousness  of  Jesus  as  the  absolute  and 
unique  Lord  of  all,  his~.conviction  that; 
through  Jesus  the  world  was  coherent  and 
intelligible  as  otherwise  it  could  not  be, 
There  were  idiosyncrasies  in  his  thought,  P^ 
there  were  daring  flights  of  speculation, 
in  which  few  of  his  contemporaries  or 
successors  in  the  church  could  follow  him; 
but  the  fundamental  faith  which  underlay  ^ 
his  gospel  was  neither  an  idiosyncrasy  nor 
a  speculation.  Paul  was  a  Christian  beforp,^' 
he  was  a  Paulinist,  and  even  when  he  is 
most  independent  and  unique,  most  tech- 

33 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

nical  in  his  dialectic  and  most  original  in 
his  exposition,  the  controlling  interest  of 
his  argument  is  to  draw  out  what  appeared 
to  him  the  significance  of  all  that  was  im- 
plied in  the  Jesus  whom  he  and  his  fellow- 
Christians  worshipped  as  their  Lord. 

Thus  the  sources  of  a  Pauline  idea  are  less 
important,  from  our  point  of  view,  than  what 
Paul  drew  from  them.  Wherever  the  fruit 
was  gathered  and  on  whatever  soil  it  had 
originally  grown,  he  pressed  the  grapes  him- 
self and  poured  the  new  wine  into  his  own 
wine-skins.  Hence,  in  order  to  appreciate 
the  quality  of  this  Paulinism,as  distinct  from 
the  wine  of  thought  which  nourished  other 
Christians,  it  is  essential  to  begin  with  some 
fundamental  conception  common,  in  germ 
at  least,  to  both.  The  most  vital  and  central 
is  that  of  the  Spirit,  in  relation  to  the  person 
of  Christ  and  to  the  Christian  experience,. 
It  is  from  this,  and  not  from  any  dialectic 
about  justification,  that  our  estimate  of  the 

34 


PAUL   AND  PAULINISM 

subject  ought  to  start.  While  the  primitive 
apostolic  view  regarded  the  Spirit  as  the 
endowment  which  Jesus  received  at  bap- 
tism for  his  messianic  vocation  upon  earth, 
deeper  reflection  upon  the  significance  of 
the  Lord's  personality  soon  led  to  a  double 
development  of  this  relationship  between 
the  Spirit  and  Jesus.  On  the  one  hand,  a  grow- 
ing conviction  of  his  divine  nature  could 
not  rest  satisfied  with  any  tradition  which 
left  his  antecedents  unaccounted  for;  conse- 
quently the  Spirit  came  to  be  associated  with 
his  birth.  On  the  other  hand,  and  at  an  earlier 
date,  the  function  of  the  Spirit  was  asso- 
ciated with  his  resurrection  :  Jesus,  it  was 
held,  became  truly  messiah  when  he  was 
raised  from  the  dead.  Some  traces  of  this 
conception  lie  in  juxtaposition  with  the 
baptism-idea,  even  inside  the  primitive  apos- 
tolic tradition,  but  it  was  Paul  who  gave 
fullest  expression  to  it.  This  was  only  nat- 
ural, as  he  did  not  belong  to  the  circle  of  dis- 

35 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

ciples  who  had  known  Jesus  on  earth,  and 
as  his  first  experience  of  the  Lord  was  a  vi- 
sion of  Jesus  as  the  risen  and  exalted  Christ. 
The  reality  of  Christ's  nature  was  Spirit,  on\ 
his  view;  Jesus  was   installed    or   consti- 
tuted Son  of  God'with  full  powers  by  the  / ./ 
resurrection,  which  revealed  and  realized/ 
his  true  nature  as  life-giving  Spirit.  His  life 
in  the  flesh  had  limited  him.  It  was  a  phase 
of  being  which  could  not  do  justice  to  him. 
But  when  that  temporary  impoverishment 
of   nature  was   over,  the  heavenly  reality 
shone  out  in  its  fulness.  The  Spirit  radiated 
on  men,  it  was  poured  into  their  hearts,  as 
the  Spirit  of  one  who  had  died  and  risen  for 
the  sake  of  men.  We  must  extinguish,  how- 
ever, the  misconception  that  Paul  regarded 
the  Spirit  as  acting  on  the  lines  of  a  natural  i 
force  in  the  evolution  of  the  religious  life.  ( 
To  him  it  meant  the  gracious  power  of  God  ■  ,^ 
which  evoked  faith  in  Jesus  as  the  crucified/ 
and  risen  Christ  and  then  mediated  to  the 


\  PAUL  AND    PAULINISM 

receptive,  obedient  life  all  that  the  Lord 
was  and  did  for  his  own  people. 

The  Spirit,  in  this  usage  of  Paul,  is  not 
to  be  regarded  as  equivalent  to  the  mere  in- 
fluence of  God.  It  includes  an  ontological 
as  well  as  an  ethical  element,  in  modern 
parlance,  and  this  applies  not  simply  to  the 
glorified  nature  of  the  risen  Christ,  but  to  the 
believing  man  upon  whom  the  vital  power 
of  that  nature  streams  out.  The  Spirit  affects 
the  organism  of  the  human  spirit ;  it  is 
hyper-physical  as  well  as  moral  in  its  work- 
ing. Paul  shrank,  for  example,  with  Phari- 
saic dislike,  from  any  Hellenic  conception 
of  the  immortality  of  the  soul  apart  from  a 
body.  His  realism  made  him  shudder  at  any 
idea  of  disembodiment.  It  is  not  possible  to 
determine  his  exact  view  of  the  risen  body, 
which  he  regarded  as  essential  to  the  risen 
life;  sometimes  he  suggests  that  the  present 
body  will  be  transformed,  sometimes  that 
an  entirely  fresh  body  will  be  ours;  but  he 

37 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

certainly  believed  in  the  creation  of  a  new 
organism  by  the  Spirit  which  should  be 
adequate  to  the  needs  of  the  new  spirit. 

Upon  the  opposite  side  Paul  safeguarded^ 
his  conception  against  vague  fancies  by  iden-  \ 
tifying  the  Spirit  of  God,  which  had  been  ' 
promised  as  a  messianic  gift,  with  the  Spirit 
of  Jesus  the  Christ.  This  association  of  the 
idea  with  the  personality  of  Jesus  lent  it  pre- 
cision and  reality.  It  was  not  a  mere  force 
or  a  supernatural  power  like  the  numerous 
spirits  and  oracles  in  the  pagan  world;  the 
Spirit  of  Christ  is  to  Paul  ^/le  Spirit.  T/ie 
Lord^  he  once  said,  is  the  Spirit.  To  be  in  \  / 
the  Spirit  means  not  ecstasy  and  transports  W 
but  a  life  in  Christ,  an  identification  or  incor-- 
poration  of  one's  self  with  him,  which  dif- 
fers on  the  one  hand  from  the  reveries  of  a 
mystical  pantheism,  and  on  the  other  from 
the  frenzy  of  prophetic  raptures. 

This  identification  was  one  of  Paul's  most 
characteristic  and  fruitful  achievements  in 

38 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

the  field  of  Christian  doctrine.  Jesus  was  the 
Christ  of  God,  and  the  proof  of  that  was  the 
Spirit.  So  far  Paul  and  his  contemporaries 
were  at  one.  Where  he  went  beyond  them 
was  in  his  definition  of  that  proof.  To  the 
primitive  church  in  Jerusalem  the  death  of 
Jesus  seemed  primarily  a  crime  of  the  Jews 
which,  in  God's  order  of  providence,  was 
connected  with  the  forgiveness  of  sins.  The 
resurrection  of  Jesus  led  them  to  seek  proofs 
of  this  in  Old  Testament  prophecy,  and  to 
anticipate  the  speedy  return  of  Jesus  in  full 
messianic  glory  in  order  to  complete  the 
establishment  of  the  divine  kingdom.  Mean- 
time the  ecstatic  phenomena  of  the  Spirit 
were  hailed,  according  to  Joel's  prophecy, 
as  the  harbingers  of  this  final  era.  Paul  took 
what  was  at  once  a  wider  and  a  deeper  view. 
Though  he  never  appealed,  as  the  primitive 
church  did,  to  the  miracles  of  Jesus  as  proof 
of  his  messianic  authority,  he  too  regarded 
the  contemporary  phenomena  of  the  Spirit 

39 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

as  an  authentic  proof  of  Christ's  messianic 
position.  Had  there  been  no  resurrection' 
of  Jesus,  there  would  have  been  no  Spirit  , 
visible  and  audible  in  the  lives  of  believing 
men.  But  the  Spirit  came  to  represent  not 
so  much  an  ecstatic  as  an  ethical  power  to 
Paul;  it  was  the  vital  principle  of  the  Chris- 
tian life,  rather  than  an  endowment  for 
special  occasions,  and  he  verified  it,  not  in 
sudden  raptures  or  transient  fits  of  religious 
emotion  or  any  mysterious  excitement  of 
the  personality,  but  in  the  normal  life  of  the 
Christian  within  the  church.  The  vine  of 
the  primitive  church  throve  on  volcanic  soil. 
But  the  ardent  hope  of  the  end  was  not 
nourished  upon  mere  inferences  from  pro- 
phecy; it  was  rooted  in  the  leaf-mould  of 
experience.  Only,  this  experience  was  an 
infinitely  richer  and  deeper  thing  to  Paul 
than  to  most  of  his  contemporaries;  what 
they  took  usually  to  be  primary  seemed  to 
him  secondary  and  subsidiary.  It  was  one  of 

40 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

those  changes  of  emphasis  in  religion  which 
are  epoch-making.  He  did  believe  that  mi- 
raculous, intermittent  powers  were  an  en- 
dowment of  the  Spirit;  he  was  conscious 
of  possessing  them  himself,  and  he  included 
them  among  the  gifts  of  the  Spirit  to  the 
church.  God  suf flies  you  with  the  Spirit^ 
he  told  the  Christians  of  Galatia,  and  ivorks 
miracles  among  you.  And  yet  the  charac- 
teristic outcome  of  the  Spirit,  after  all,  lay 
not  in  extraordinary  phenomena,  but  in  love^ 
joy,  peace,  longsuffering,  kindness,  bene- 
ficence, fidelity ,  meekness,  and  self-control. 
It  was  along  this  line  that  Paul  commonly 
connected  the  Spirit  with  his  eschatology. 
Such  effects  of  the  Spirit  were  to  him  the 
first-fruits  and  pledge  of  a  final  bliss  which 
could  not  be  enjoyed  until  the  believer  was 
delivered  from  the  thwarting  and  corrupting 
influences  of  the  world,  the  flesh,  and  the 
devil.  Sometimes,  as  in  i  Thessalonians,the 
Spirit  as  the  power  of  the  Christian  experi- 

41 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

ence  was  not  directly  related  to  the  ardent 
hope  of  the  end;  the  doctrinal  position  here 
lies  closer  to  the  simple  and  popular  piety  of 
the  churches;  as  a  rule,  however,  the  con- . 
vinced  hope  of  the^nd  is  allied  to  that  faith-  \ 
mysticism  of  the  Christian's  union  with 
Christ  which  is  well  known  to  all  readers  of  . 
the  Epistles.  One  germ  of  the  latter  concep- 
tion lay  in  the  primitive  view  of  baptism  into 
the  name  of  Jesus,  which  implied  an  identifi- 
cation of  the  recipient  with  the  nature  of  the 
Lord;  but  Paul  developed  the  idea  in  his 
own  way,  eschatologically  and  otherwise. 
The  eschatological  aspect  of  the  Spirit 
can  also  be  traced  even  within  the  concep- 
tion of  Christ's  death  in  relation  to  the  Law, 
on  which  Paul  generally  based  his  faith- 
mysticism.  Into  the  ramifications  of  this 
theory  we  cannot  enter  here,  but  the  salient 
features  of  it  are  quite  familiar  and  they  will 
sufl^ice  for  our  present  purpose.  Obviously, 
the  fact  that  Jesus  had  died  under  the  Law 

42 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

compelled  Paul  to  readjust  his  inherited 
ideas  about  the  Law,  Israel,  and  God.  The 
significance  of  that  death  lay  in  the  sinless 
nature  of  Jesus.  The  primitive  church  as  a 
rule  was  content  to  view  the  crucifixion  in 
the  light  of  the  mysterious  prophecy  of  God's 
suffering  servant  in  Isaiah  liii,  interpreted 
by  the  current  Jewish  belief  in  the  expia- 
tory value  of  the  sufferings  and  death  of  the 
righteous.  Paul  assumed  the  latter  as  axio- 
matic, though  he  never  worked  much  with 
the  Isaianic  prophecy.  Jesus,  he  held,  vol-\ 
untarily  took  the  place  of  sinful  men  as  ] 
they  lay  under  the  curse  and  condemnation  f' 
of  a  Law  whose  statutes  they  were  unable 
to  keep.  To  his  sombre  vision,  as  he  looked 
behind  and  around  him,  Sin  and  Death,  like 
allied  powers,  were  crushing  men  with  all 
the  added  momentum  which  they  had  ac- 
quired during  the  ages  since  Adam  first 
disobeyed.  But  Jesus  interposed.  The  inno- 
cent suffered  for  the  guilty.  He  graciously 

43 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

bore  in  his  own  person  the  consequence  of 
sin  for  men,  and  this  vicarious  endurance  of 
sin's  penalty  availed  before  God  to  justify, 
or  save  from  the  divine  wrath  at  the  end, 
all  who  accepted  him  as  the  Christ  of  God. 
Such  a  forensic  theory,  which  represents 
an  attempt  to  interpret  in  terms  of  Pharisaic 
theology  the  relations  between  the  death 
of  Christ  and  the  guilt  rather  than  the  power 
of  sin,  appears  to  ignore  the  Spirit  and  also 
to  make  faith  little  more  than  intellectual 
assent  to  a  doctrine.  But  when  we  cease  to 
isolate  it  or  to  regard  it  as  the  primary  ba- 
sis of  his  theolog}',  it  acquires  a  slightly  dif- 
ferent aspect.  What  is  meant  negatively  by 
justification  and  positively  by  adoption  into 
sonship  is  participation  in  the  spiritual  na- 
ture of  Jesus  Christ;  it  is  not  some  formal 
preliminary  to  life  in  the  Spirit.  In  one  sense, 
even,  it  is  prospective,  since,  although  be- 
lievers are  now  free  from  condemnation,  this 
assures  them  of  final  acquittal  and  also  in- 

44 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

troduces  them  to  an  experience  of  union 
with  Christ  which  is  not  fully  realized  until 
the  end.  While   the   security  of  acquittal 
might  be  conceived  in  such  a  way  as  to  re- 
duce Christ  to  the  level  of  a  mere  function- 
ary or  executive  agent,  —  a  tendency  which 
beset  several  of  the  messianic  categories, — 
Paul  avoided  this  unethical  abstraction  by  , 
conceiving  justification  as  an  act  of  grace.  ! 
The  redeeming  death  of  Jesus  Christ,  which 
assured  Christians  of  their  future  and  final  j 
standing  before  God,  was  to  him  far  more 
than  a  messianic  episode;  he  saw  in  it  the  |  ]/ 
supreme  revelation  of  God's  heart,  the  sac-  | 
rifice  of  his  beloved  Son,  and  the  free  love/ 
of  the  Son  himself.  Christ  had  the  unshared 
glory  of  having  not  only  shared  but  borne 
the  shame  of  sinful  men.  Furthermore,  the 
character  of  this  divine  redemption  which 
underlay  the  experience  of  the  justified  and 
forgiven  man  involved  a  similar  conception 
of  its  aim.   Since  the  sonship  of  Jesus  was 

45 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

one  of  spirit  rather  than  of  vocation,  his 
work  for  men  meant  their  transformation 
into  his  own  likeness,  the  restoration  of  the 
divine  ideal  at  the  creation.  The  eternal 
life,  for  which  justification  was  the  condi- 
tion, was  a  life  of  sonship,  such  as  Christ, 
the  firstborn  mnong  niafiy  brothers^  enjoyed 
with  God  the  Father.  To  Paul,  the  term 
"  Son  of  God,"  as  applied  to  Jesus,  had  a 
richer  content  than  that  of  "messiah";  it 
implied  the  Spirit,  and  the  relation  of  the 
Spirit  to  human  faith  was  deeper  than  any 
forensic  or  juridical  categories.  The  spir- 
itual personality,  which  was  the  end  of  the 
redeeming  purpose,  and  for  which  Paul  is 
fond  of  using  the  semi-technical  term  right-- 
eousnessj  cannot  be  supposed  to  originate 
with  any  formal  verdict  or  promise  of  ac- 
quittal on  God's  part,  or  with  any  formal  as- 
sent upon  man's.  The  saving  faith  of  Paul's 
theology  had  the  three  elements  which  con-^ 
stitute  any  genuine  faith.  The  believing  man ' 

46 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

had  to  believe  certain  facts  about  Jesus,  on 
the  witness  of  historical  tradition.  Other- 
wise his  confession,  "Jesus  is  the  Lord  or 
the  Christ,"  would  have  been  meaningless. 
His  faith  also  was  doctrinal  or  intellectual, -t/ 
in  so  far  as  it  included  an  assent  to  some 
theoretical  explanation  of  the  meaning 
which  attached  to  Christ's  action.  Further- 
more and  fundamentally,  it  denoted  personals 
confidence.  Of  these  three  elements,  that 
of  personal  appropriation  or  trust  was  the 
greatest  for  Paul,  though  we  cannot  always 
understand  the  scale  of  relative  values  which 
he  assigned  to  them.  Where  faith  seems  al- 
most identified  with  belief  or  assent,  is  in 
his  theoretical  and  polemical  exposition  of 
that  religious  standing  which,  as  a  result  of 
Christ's  death  and  resurrection,  he  already 
experienced  in  the  freedom  and  vitality  of 
his  personal  faith.  He  seems  to  have  viewed 
his  faith-mysticism  as  homogeneous  with 
his  juridical  view  of  the  atonement,  not  as 

47 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

an  alternative.  In  any  case  —  and  this  is  of 
cardinal  importance  —  the  former  was  not 
a  supplement  to  the  latter,  which  succeeded 
in  getting  faith  under  weigh  for  the  course 
of  the  new  life.  The  nexus  between  the 
forensic  and  the  ethical  aspects  must  lie 
somewhere  in  the  faith  which  affirms  the 
meaning  of  Christ's  death  and  produces 
the  new  freedom. 

There  are  three  aspects  or  applications  of 
the  Spirit,  in  Paul's  exposition  of  the  Chris- 
tian experience,  which  may  be  selected 
to  illustrate  how  his  deeper  mind  broke 
through  the  restrictions  of  less  vital  theories 
upon  the  nature  of  faith  as  determined  by 
the  nature  of  its  divine  object. 

{a)  The  first  occurs  in  the  famous  antithe- 
sis between  the  legal  constitution  of  Israel 
and  the  new  Christian  order,  as  letter  and 
Spirit  respectively.  His  argument  in  2  Cor- 
inthians iii :  6-iv :  6  is  that  the  practical  effect 
of  the  Law  is  to  produce  an  unspiritual,  dead- 

48 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

ening  legalism.  This  would  be  hotly  denied 
by  his  Jewish  opponents,  who  would  also 
charge  him  with  confusing  the  moral  and 
the  ceremonial  law.  Paul's  contention  might 
be  supported  by  the  plea  that  there  may  be 
a  morality  which  is  as  external  as  any  rit- 
ual system.  At  any  rate,  generalizing  from 
his  own  unhappy  experience,  he  held  that 
the  influence  of  the  Law  was  deadening  and 
oppressive,  whereas,  instead  of  anxious  per- 
plexity about  whether  or  not  one  has  kept 
all  the  statutory  regulations,  a  glad,  free  con- 
fidence, born  of  a  new  vitality,  inspired  the 
Christian.  The  letter  kills,  but  the  Spirit 
gives  life.  This  is  the  superior  and  sur- 
passing glory  of  the  Spirit  or  of  righteous- 
ness (for  the  two  terms  are  correlative  here). 
The  Lord  Jesus,  who  as  Spirit  dominates 
the  new  order  of  being,  not  only  is  the  im- 
age of  God,  but  has  the  power  of  transform- 
ing Christians  into  the  same  image  or  glory 
by  the  influence  of  his  Spirit  upon  theirs. 

49 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

There  is  a  characteristic  play  upon  the  dou- 
ble sense  of  glory  as  material  brilliance  and 
also  as  the  substance  of  the  radiant  heav- 
enly being  shared  by  Christ  and  Christians; 
but  the  practical  implication  is  that  the  en- 
tire Christian  experience  from  first  to  last, 
with  all  its  freshness  and  freedom,  is  deter- 
mined by  Christ's  possession  of  the  divine 
Spirit  in  its  fulness  and  by  his  communica- 
tion of  it  to  believing  men.  This  fundamen-; 
tal  doctrine  of  Paulinism,  the  supersession 
of  the  Law  by  the  Spirit,  broke  with  the 
rabbinic  doctrine  that  the  Law  was  given 
b}^  God  as  the  remedy  for  the  evil  impulse 
or yezer.  Preoccupation  with  the  Torah,  the 
rabbis  taught,  kept  the  pious  from  falling 
under  the  sway  of  the  evil  impulse,  and  a 
passage  like  Genesis  iv  :  7  was  interpreted 
in  the  light  of  such  a  theory.  Paul  reversed 
this  function  of  the  Law.  Instead  of  a  rem- 
edy, he  declared  it  had  proved  an  aggrava- 
tion to  sin.   When  the  commandment  came^ 

50 


/ 


PAUL   AND  PAULINISM 

sin  revived.  Like  the  rabbis,  Paul  declined 
to  connect  the  origin  of  the  evil  yezer  with 
Satan,  though  he  still  viewed  it  as  a  power 
within  man  and  also  in  a  sense  as  foreign 
to  him;  but,  unlike  them,  he  made  no  at- 
tempt to  connect  it  with  God,  or  to  explain 
its  genesis  in  relation  to  providence.  The 
animistic  presuppositions  of  his  belief  at  this 
point  are  not  worked  out.  But  the  help 
which,  according  to  rabbinic  doctrine,  God 
vouchsafed  to  man  in  his  struggles  against 
the  evil  instinct,  was  taken  up  by  Paul  into 
his  remarkable  conception  of  the  Spirit 
striving  inwardly  against  the  lusts  of  the 
flesh  in  the  realization  of  the  new  righteous- 
ness or  spiritual  personality.  On  the  otherr  y 
hand,  he  never  regarded  the  flesh  as  in-l 
herently  evil.  His  language  is  often  tinged 
with  the  practical  dualism  of  earnest  piety, 
but  he  did  not  share  the  Hellenistic  tend- 
ency to  view  the  flesh  or  material  consti- 
tution of  man  as  inherently  and  hopelessly 

SI 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

corrupt.  The  flesh  had  become  the  seat  and 
headquarters  of  sin,  but  the  Christian  could 
live  the  life  of  the  Spirit  in  the  flesh.  He 
could  and  did.  The  life  I  now  live  in  the 
Jieshllive  by  faith  in  God^s  Son^  who  loved 
vie  and  gave  himself  for  ine.  When  a  man 
yielded  his  will  to  the  contact  of  the  Spirit 
of  Jesus  Christ,  he  got  the  upper  hand  of  the 
flesh.  The  new  vital  principle  dominated 
his  being,  physical  as  well  as  moral  and 
mental ;  it  transformed  his  nature  into  a  spir- 
itual personality,  independent  of  external 
statutes  and  controlled  or  rather  inspired 
by  the  very  Spirit  of  the  indwelling  Christ. 
For,  while  the  Spirit  represents  to  Paul,  as 
to  the  primitive  church,  the  creative  activ- 
ity of  God,  the  medium  through  which  He 
achieves  his  purpose,  the  apostle  mainly 
connects  this  power  with  the  fulfilment  of 
human  nature  and  of  the  divine  will  in  the 
sonship  of  Christian  experience.  He  does 
not  dwell  much  on  the  function  of  the  Spirit 

52 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

in  overthrowing  the  visible  and  invisible 
rulers  of  the  darkness  and  in  establishino: 
God's  kingdom.  The  power  of  the  Spirit  — 
and  the  Spirit  is  invariably  a  power  —  is 
manifested  preeminently  in  the  creation  of 
the  new  life  which  the  Spirit  reveals  and  im- 
parts to  those  who  believe  in  the  Son  of  God. 
The  significant  feature  of  this  conception 
is  the  collocation  of  the  Christian  expe- 
rience with  the  Spirit  from  beginning  to 
end.  The  experience  of  the  Spirit  was  not 
a  further  boon  bestowed  at  baptism  upon 
those  who  by  some  earlier  act  of  faith  had 
been  justified  and  thereby  freed  from  legal- 
ism. The  distinctive  note  or  atmosphere  \  y' 
of  the  new  Christian  order  was  sonship ) 
towards  God.  Because  you  are  sons  (no 
longer  minors  or  slaves,  under  the  Law), 
because  the  distant  feeling  of  legalism  has 
been  now  superseded  by  filial  trust,  God 
sent  forth  the  Spirit  of  his  Son  into  our 
hearts^  crying  Abba^  Father,  The  filial 

S3 


PAUL    AND  PAULINISM 

standing  of  Christians  is  not  only  proved 
but  realized,  Paul  argues,  by  the  Spirit  of 
Christ  as  a  fact  and  force  in  their  expe- 
rience. Their  consciousness  of  the  Spirit 
is  the  basis  and  criterion  of  true  sonship. 
The  reason  why  such  trust  in  the  Father 
exists  in  any  life  is  because  God  has  elicited 
and  encouraged  it  by  the  revelation  of 
himself  in  Jesus  Christ.  Faith  had  its  stages 
and  degrees  of  confidence  for  Paul,  but 
from  the  first  it  was  a  product  of  the  Spirit; 
without  the  Spirit  it  could  not  have  existed 
for  any  Christian. 

He  knew  this  from  his  own  experience. 
The  knowledge  of  his  messianic  vocation 
and  character  had  been  a  revelation  even 
to  Jesus,  at  his  baptism.  To  Peter  also, 
who  knew  the  Lord  in  the  flesh,  it  had 
come  as  a  revelation:  Flesh  and  blood  have 
not  revealed  it  to  thee,  but  my  Father 
in  heaven.  Paul  was  conscious  of  hav- 
ing received  it  in  exactly  the  same  way, 

54 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

not  by  argument,  but  by  revelation;  the 
knowledge  of  Christ  as  Lord  and  Spirit 
meant  spiritual  apprehension,  and  he  never 
doubted  that  the  same  principle  underlay 
the  life  of  Christians  in  general.  However 
their  experience  began,  it  could  not  be 
experience  till  it  started  with  the  faith 
which  the  Spirit  alone  could  produce.  For 
no  man  is  able  to  say^  Jesus  is  Lord^  except 
in  the  Holy  Spirit, 

The  second  (<^)  aspect  of  the  relation- 
ship appears  in  the  fact  that  the  experiences 
of  the  Spirit  which  Paul  verified  through- 
out his  mission  served  to  authenticate  the 
faith  of  Gentile  Christians.  If  they  could 
enjoy  the  promised  Spirit  of  Christ,  it 
proved  that  they  had  a  right  and  standing 
of  their  own  within  the  new  messianic 
realm  of  Jesus.  This  is  the  point  of  Gala- 
tians  iii  :  14  f.  The  argument  does  not 
appeal  to  any  words  of  Jesus.  For  his  con- 
ception of   the  Spirit,  as  evoking  a  faith 

55 


PAUL   AND  PAULINISM 

independent  of  the  Law,  Paul  had  even 
less  authority,  so  far  as  the  word  of  Jesus 
went,  than  for  his  mission  to  the  Gentiles. 
His  authority  for  the  former  rested  upon 
his  own  experience  of  all  that  the  Lord 
had  been  to  him  and  done  for  him,  and 
he  based  the  latter  upon  his  consciousness 
that  this  experience  was  neither  a  personal 
nor  a  Jewish  idiosyncrasy.  For  both  he 
sought  and  found  proofs  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. Thus  from  the  well-known  passages 
in  Genesis  he  once  argued  that  prior  to 
the  Law  God  had  promised  the  blessing  of 
justification  by  faith,  and  that  to  Gentiles. 
Was  it  not  written  that  Abraham' s  faith 
was  reckoned  to  him  for  righteousness? 
Then  it  followed  (i)  that  those  who  have  the 
same  faith  in  God  are  sons  of  Abraham, 
whether  they  are  of  Jewish  or  of  pagan  birth, 
and  (ii)  that  the  Mosaic  Law,  which  was 
subsequent  to  this  basis,  became  obsolete 
when  Christ  arrived  to  realize  the  original 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

condition  of  faith.  This  method  of  reasoning 
is  quite  characteristic  of  Paul's  rabbinical 
training.  When  Agrippa  II  asked  Rabbi 
Eliezer  why  circumcision  was  not  one  of 
the  ten  commandments,  if  God  attached 
such  value  to  it  as  the  Jews  alleged,  the 
rabbi  is  said  to  have  retorted  that  circum- 
cision had  been  enjoined  prior  to  the  ten 
commandments,  and  to  have  quoted  as  his 
authority  the  words  of  Exodus  xix  :  ^  :  If 
you  will  obey  my  voice  and  keep  my  cove- 
nant^ then  shall  you  be  a  peculiar  treasure 
unto  me  from,  among  all  peoples.  This 
covenant,  said  the  rabbi,  was  one  of  cir- 
cumcision. Paul  is  using  the  same  kind  of 
argument  (in  Galatians  iii  :  6  f.)  in  order  to 
prove  that  the  Law  was  inferior  and  subse- 
quent to  the  primary  requirement  of  faith. 
The  promise  to  Abraham,  he  declares,  came 
430  years  before  the  Law.  It  anticipated 
the  gospel.  His  contention  is  that  the  Law, 
instead  of  being,  as  his   opponents   held, 

57 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

the  sole  revelation  of  God's  will,  was  only 
a  transitory  phase;   previous  to  the  Law, 
God  had  dealt  with  men  (as  represented 
in  Abraham)  on  the  basis  of  a  grace  which 
implied  personal  faith,  and  this  basis  was 
now  ratified  to   the  full  in  the  revelation 
of  Jesus,  whose  death  meant  the  superses- 
sion of  the  Law  as  a   means  of  attaining 
righteousness.    The    one    alternative    now 
open  to   men  was  the  Law  or  Christ.  If 
they  chose  the  Law,  they  were  done  with 
Christ.    If  they  chose   Christ,  they  were\  ./ 
done  with  the  Law.  Furthermore,  in  choos-/ 
ing  Christ,  that  is,  in  accepting  the  basis  of  ] 
grace  and  faith  for  their  religion,  they  were  j 
simply  reverting  to  the  original  purpose  of  j 
God,  which  evokes  the  faith,  not  of  assent  \ 
to  a  juridical  process,  but  of  personal  trust.  ' 
Had  Paul  made  the  saving  faith  of  his  the- 
ory anything  less  than  that,  he  would  have 
been  reintroducing  a  modified  legalism. 
There  is  yet  another  (c)  aspect  of  the 

58 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

matter.  Paul  had  a  gnosis  or  philosoph}^ 
of  religion  which  spanned  heaven  and 
earth.  In  several  incidental  allusions  to  this 
scheme  of  thought,  the  pre-Christian  con- 
dition of  humanity  is  described  as  a  state 
of  subjection  to  the  elements  or  spirit-rulers 
of  the  worlds  that  is,  according  to  the  Jew- 
ish tradition  which  Paul  follows,  cosmic 
spirits  or  angelic  powers  such  as  those  who 
were  the  medium  of  the  Law  for  Israel,  or 
those  who  as  gods  many  and  lords  many 
exerted  upon  pagans  a  fascination  which 
passed  into  idolatry.  To  the  latter  cosmic 
powers  Paul  in  one  passage  (i  Corinthians 
ii  :  8  f.)  actually  attributes  the  crime  of  the 
crucifixion.  Their  worship  with  its  ritual  — 
for  Paul  even  refers  the  punctilious  system 
of  festivals  and  seasons  to  the  seductive 
influence  of  these  stars,  etc.,  which  regu- 
lated their  recurrence  —  was  contrary  to  the 
worship  of  the  true  God.  Their  wisdom  or 
religious  philosophy  had  no  place  for  the 

59 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

Cross.  But  the  crucifixion  really  proved 
their  undoing.  God  forgave  all  of  us  our 
trespasses^  cancelling  the  bond  of  legal 
enactments  whichstood  against  us  —  that 
he  set  aside^  nailing  it  to  the  cross ^  dis- 
arming the  Principalities  and  Powers, 
he  exposed  them  and  triumphed  over  them 
openly  in  the  cross.  This  is  one  of  the  dark 
corners  or  dark  passages  in  Paul,  but  the 
annulment  of  the  Law  evidently  became 
for  him  part  of  a  cosmic  and  supernatu- 
ral drama;  the  crucifixion  was  the  divine 
discomfiture  of  the  angelic  and  demonic 
powers  which  had  hitherto  dominated  man; 
Christ  was  now  superior  to  all  principali- 
ties and  powers,  and  at  the  end  he  would 
be  worshipped  by  them.  Two  practical  in- 
ferences follow.  In  the  first  place,  no  Chris- 
tian need  fear  the  malign  influence  of  such 
angelic  powers.  Paul  is  sure  that  neither 
death  (when  such  spirits  are  most  active), 
nor  life,  nor  angels,  nor  Principalities,  nor 

60 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

Powers  shall  be  able  to  separate  us  from 
the  love  of  God^  ivhich  is  in  Christ  Jesus 
our  Lord.  Jesus  is  now  Lord  of  the  uni- 
verse which  was  created  by  means  of  him, 
and  no  power  in  that  universe  is  more 
potent  than  the  tie  between  him  and  his 
redeemed.  The  latter  share  in  his  spiritual 
nature,  which  is  proof  against  all  lower 
spirits.  But  this  relief  from  the  fears  which 
haunted  the  imagination  implied  that  be- 
lievers must  own  Jesus  as  the  sole  medium 
of  revelation  and  communion.  Paul's  argu- 
ment is  that  every  other  kind  of  religious 
appeal  ought  to  be  a  dead  letter  to  them. 
Any  recourse  to  the  ministry  of  angels,  or 
any  subservience  to  the  legalism  and  idola- 
try which  they  foster,  would  impugn  that 
unique  position  of  Jesus  as  Lord  and  as 
the  Spirit  which  is  implicit  in  Christian 
faith,  and  which,  on  animistic  principles, 
involves  the  dislodgment  of  the  evil  power 
from  human  life. 

6i 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

There  are  traces  of  this  conception  in 
the  Gospels  (see  also  a  passage  like  Acts 
X :  38),  where  the  work  of  Jesus  on  earth 
is  occasionally  regarded  as  the  undoing  of 
Satan's  power  and  the  overthrow  of  de- 
mons. But  Paul  develops  it  characteris- 
tically in  connexion  with  his  inherited 
Christology  of  a  divine  being,  a  preexist- 
ent  heavenly  Man,  who  generously  stooped 
to  enter  the  poverty  and  thralldom  of  men 
in  order  to  redeem  them  from  the  tyranny 
of  the  dark,  evil  world-powers.  The  notice- 
able thing  in  this  theosophy  is  that  his 
conceptions  of  the  preexistent  Christ  did 
not  view  Jesus  as  the  incarnate  Spirit  of 
God;  they  drew  rather  on  the  ideas  of  wis- 
dom and  the  Logos  than  on  the  Spirit, 
although,  in  his  implicit  polemic  against 
the  Philonic  reading  of  Genesis  i-ii,  the 
apostle  defined  the  last  Adam  as  essentially 
Spirit,  the  archetype  and  head  of  a  spirit- 
ual race.  The  word  of  the  Cross  was  also  a 

62 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

word  of  the  Spirit,  and  no  spiritual  theoso- 
phy,  however  plausible  and  imposing,  was 
valid  if  it  ignored  the  former.  This  is  the 
point,  and  it  is  a  barbed  point,  of  the  pas- 
sages to  which  we  have  just  referred.  They 
reflect  a  cosmic  rather  than  a  forensic  view 
of  the  work  of  Christ,  but  they  indicate  the 
central  truth  on  which  all  the  lines  of 
Paul's  thought  converge,  namely,  that  the 
relation  between  Christ  and  men  begins 
in  the  Spirit  and  in  faith. 

It  is  by  thinking  out  such  conceptions 
of  the  Spirit  and  of  eschatology,  by  think- 
ing them  together,  and  by  focussing  every- 
thing in  their  light,  that  we  arrive  at  a  his- 
torical estimate  of  Paulinism.  In  both,  in 
his  ideas  of  the  Spirit  and  of  the  last  things, 
Paul  is  at  once  most  himself  and  most  a 
Christian  of  his  own  age.  Their  interaction 
is  the  clue  to  his  distinctive  beliefs.  A 
modern  finds  it,  perhaps,  hardest  to  think 
himself  back  into  the  eschatological  world 

63 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

of  the  apostle,  and  yet  this  effort  of  the 
imagination  is  essential,  for  it  is  there  that 
Paul  reveals  himself,  not  as  Greek,  nor 
as  Hebrew,  nor  even  as  Roman,  but  as  a 
Christian  of  the  first  generation. 

A  single  instance  will  serve  to  make  this 
clear.  From  his  father  he  inherited  the 
privilege  of  Roman  citizenship.  Occasion- 
ally he  appealed  to  this  in  an  emergency, 
and  it  must  undoubtedly  have  been  one 
factor  in  developing  his  large  vision  of 
mankind;  but  his  real  pride  was  to  be,  in 
Dante's  phrase,  "a  citizen  of  that  Rome 
where  Christ  is  Roman."  In  his  last  letter, 
written  from  Rome,  he  protests :  Our  com- 
monwealth lies  in  heaven^  whence  tve  look 
eagerly  for  the  Lord  yesus  Christ  as  our 
Saviour.  His  breadth  of  mind  enabled 
him  to  seize  strategic  points  throughout 
the  empire  for  the  propaganda  of  the  gos- 
pel, but  we  must  be  strictly  on  our  guard 
against  supposing  that  it  ever  occurred  to 

64 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

him  to  regard  Christianity  as  a  new  reli- 
gion for  the  empire.  His  eschatology  ruled 
any  notion  of  that  kind  out  of  his  horizon. 
The  churches  scattered  over  the  world 
were  conceived  by  him  rather  as  settled 
in  an  evil  and  transient  age,  like  so  many 
outposts  and  colonies  of  the  heavenly  com- 
monwealth which  was  ere  long  to  be  es- 
tablished by  the  return  of  Jesus.  Their 
duty  was  to  wait  and  be  loyal  till  they 
were  relieved.  The  revival  hymn  with  its 
refrain, — 

*'  Hold  the  fort,  for  I  am  coming,'* 

Jesus  signals  still ; 
Wave  the  answer  back  to  heaven, 

"  By  Thy  grace  we  will !  "  — 

may  be  a  crude  representation  of  Paul's 
eschatology,  but  it  lies  leagues  nearer  to 
what  he  and  his  contemporaries  believed 
than  any  attempt  to  read  back  into  his 
thought  the  anachronism  of  a  purified  em- 
pire as  the  ideal  and  aim  of  the  evangel. 

6s 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

His  perspective  was  not  imperialist.  Still, 
it  was  singularly  free  from  any  narrow- 
ness or  nationalism.  In  one  passage,  in- 
deed (Romans  ix-xi),  the  keen  Jewish 
feeling  which  had  led  him  to  rehabilitate 
the  Law  (perhaps,  in  a  recoil  from  anti- 
nomianism),  even  after  he  had  apparently 
discredited  it,  forced  him  into  a  similar 
antinomy;  he  set  himself  to  think  out  a 
special  future  of  honour  for  the  Jewish  na- 
tion within  the  course  of  God's  redeeming 
purpose.  The  religious  philosophy  of  his- 
tory which  breathes  through  the  passage 
throbs  with  strong  personal  emotion.  It 
has  been  said  that  if  Paul  had  not  spent 
himself  in  the  service  of  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  he  would  undoubtedly  have  shed 
his  blood  with  other  natives  of  Tarsus  on 
the  walls  of  Jerusalem  in  70  a.  d.,  and  not 
in  64  A.  D.  upon  the  sand  of  the  Roman 
arena.  Certainly  his  religious  patriotism 
flickered  up  within  his  Christianity.  It  sur- 

66 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

vived  the  treatment  he  received  from  Jews 
and  Judaists  alike,  and  his  thoughts  acquire 
additional  interest  when  we  find  them,  as 
here,  crossed  by  a  generous  devotion  to  his 
old  nation.  He  struggled  hard  to  prove 
that  its  exclusion  was  only  temporary;  all 
Israel  must  eventually  be  saved!  But  this 
divergence  into  a  nationalistic  outlook  was 
an  aside  from  his  mature  belief  that  all 
such  distinctions  of  race  were  abolished  by 
the  gospel.  There  is  no  place  for  Greek 
and  yew,  circumcision  and  tcncircumci- 
sion,  barbarian,  Scythian,  slave,  freeman ^ 
no,  Christ  is  all  and  in  all.  He  dreamed 
of  no  other  imperialism  than  this.  To  be 
a  member  of  such  a  divine  realm  was  to 
possess  the  Spirit  or  life  of  Christ;  no  less 
was  implied  in  the  universal  and  inward 
character  of  faith  as  trust  in  the  royal 
Father  of  all.  As  he  puts  it,  in  one  of  those 
profound  definitions  which  seem  to  drop 
almost   casually  from   him,  -we    (not   the 

67 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

Jews)  are  the  circumcision  (i.  e.,  in  mod- 
ern phrase,  the  true  church),  -who  ivorship 
by  the  Spirit  of  God,  and  glory  in  Christ 
yesus,  and  have  no  confidence  in  the  flesh. 
To  him,  the  Spirit,  the  gospel,  and  Jesus 
were  correlative  terms;  the  one  involved 
the  others.  Wherever  he  has  occasion  to 
define  any  elements  of  his  gospel,  the  Spirit 
is  either  on  his  lips  or  implied  in  what  he 
says.  It  vibrates  through  his  ideas  upon 
the  inspiration  of  the  Old  Testament,  on 
the  knowledge  of  God,  on  the  preexistent 
Christ,  on  the  church,  and  on  prophecy, 
as  well  as  on  the  special  topics  which 
we  have  just  been  discussing.  The  one 
subject  with  which  he,  like  the  primitive 
church,  never  associates  it  expressly  is  na- 
ture. But  with  this  exception,  his  idea  of 
the  Spirit  rays  out  on  practically  all  the 
aspects  of  life  which  he  had  occasion  to 
correlate  with  his  Christianity;  even  into 
his  theory  of  the   Law  in  relation  to  the 

68 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

death  of  Christ,  where  his  Pharisaic  pre- 
possessions did  not  furnish  any  suggestion 
or  support  for  a  doctrine  of  the  Spirit,  he 
contrives,  as  we  have  seen,  to  introduce  it. 
No  other  conception,  it  may  be  argued, 
will  enable  us  to  grasp  so  effectively  either 
the  points  of  contact  between  Paul  and  the 
primitive  church  or  the  equally  striking 
points  of  departure. 

What,  it  may  be  asked  in  conclusion, 
was  the  immediate  result  of  Paulinism? 
How  far  did  these  conceptions,  in  their 
characteristic  form,  enter  into  the  piety 
even  of  the  churches  which  were  under 
the  apostle's  direct  or  indirect  influence? 
We  have  few  data  for  anything  like  an 
adequate  answer,  but  it  is  plain  that  sev- 
eral of  them  proved  too  high  and  difficult 
for  the  popular  Christianity  of  the  age,  and 
it  would  be  hazardous  to  assume  that  Paul's 
churches  or  even  his  coadjutors  shared  all 

69 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

his  views.  The  subsequent  literature  of  the 
primitive  church  shows  that  the  majority 
of  Paul's  distinctive  conceptions  were  either 
misunderstood,  or.dropped,  or  modified,  as 
the  case  might  be,  in  the  course  of  a  few 
decades.  Paulinism  was  a  type,  it  was  not 
typical,  of  early  Christian  thought.  Thus, 
even  the  universalism  of  the  later  church 
was  not  based  on  Paul's  dialectic  about  the 
Law.  He  fought  that  battle  so  successfully 
that  the  issue  never  rose  again,  but  it  was 
the  result,  not  the  method,  which  his  suc- 
cessors appropriated  as  their  own.  His 
psychological  treatment  of  sin  and  the 
flesh,  together  with  the  faith-mysticism 
which  it  involved,  proved  also  too  subtle 
for  the  average  piety  of  the  church,  until 
the  Gnostics  laid  hold  of  his  distinction 
between  the  spiritual  and  the  natural  man 
for  their  own  alien  purposes.  The  Spirit 
continued  to  be  conceived  as  prophetic  in 
the  main,  and  even  the  partial  approxima- 

70 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

tion  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  to  Paul's  idea  of 
the  indwelling  Christ  moves  on  different 
lines.  His  view  of  the  Old  Testament  did 
not  satisfy  the  church  at  large.  He  did  not 
scruple  to  allegorize  parts  of  it  for  his  own 
purposes,  but  he  never  went  the  length  of 
allegorizing  it  all,  as  some  of  his  success- 
ors did.  Naturally,  too,  when  the  stress  of 
the  controversy  with  Judaism  had  passed, 
his  dialectic  on  the  Law  fell  into  the  back- 
ground before  the  need  of  conceiving 
Christianity  as  a  new  law.  The  death  of 
Christ  ceased  to  be  regarded  as  a  sacrifice, 
or,  if  it  was,  its  significance  was  otherwise 
interpreted,  and  the  antinomian  tendencies 
of  ultra-Paulinism  were  counteracted  by 
a  more  moralistic  conception. 

The  reasons  for  this  comparative  abey- 
ance of  Paulinism  within  the  early  church 
do  not  lie  wholly  in  the  Jewish  idiosyncra- 
sies of  the  apostle's  thought.  Nor  should 
they  be  regarded  necessarily  as  in  every 

71 


PAUL  AND   PAULINISM 

case  a  proof  of  religious  deterioration.  In 
the  first  place,  the  tremendous  spiritual  cri- 
sis through  which  Paul  broke  into  the  faith 
of  Christ  was  not  a  normal  experience 
among  Christians;  and  although  his  lan- 
guage upon  this  and  many  another  aspect 
of  the  gospel  was  capable  of  fruitful  appli- 
cations, as  that  of  any  classic  must  be,  the 
anguish  of  a  soul  broken  down  by  the 
accusing  witness  of  conscience  was  by  no 
means  the  uniform  preparation  for  faith  in 
Jesus  Christ.  Devout  souls  then  as  now 
put  their  trust  in  God  on  quieter  lines. 
Their  simple  relation  to  Christ  required 
nothing  of  Paul's  dialectic  about  the  curse 
of  the  law.  Again,  it  must  also  be  remem- 
bered that  while  several  of  Paul's  argu- 
ments lost  much  if  not  all  of  their  original 
point,  once  they  were  carried  by  the  flight 
of  time  beyond  the  radius  of  his  polemic 
against  the  Jews  and  Jewish  Christians  of 
his  own  day,  and  while  some  of  his  terms 

72 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

and  ideas  became  more  or  less  foreign  to 
the  next  generation,  his  profoundly  Chris-' 
tian  spirit  made  Christians  feel  at  home 
with  him  even  when  their  doctrinal  position/ 
differed  widely  from  his  own.  Something 
underlay   Paul's    speculative    conceptions 
which  outlived  them.  And  even  parts  of 
them  survived  the  process  of  transplanting. 
The  subsequent  Epistles  and  the  Gospels 
are  enough  to  show  how  far-reaching  were 
some  of  his  peculiar  beliefs,  and  how  modes 
of  thought  which  he  originated  continued 
to  permeate  more  or  less  directly  the  vari- 
ous movements  of  early  Christian  theology. 
But  all  this  does  not  invalidate  the  histori- 
cal conclusion  that  Paulinism  as  a  whole 
stood  almost  as  far  apart  from  the  Chris- 
tianity which  immediately  followed  it  as 
from  that  which  preceded  it.  There  is  one 
exception,  but  even  that  is  only  apparent. 
Marcion,  an  original  and  influential  leaderj',^ 
did  claim  to  carry  out  Paul's  principles./ 

73 


PAUL  AND  PAULINISM 

But  his  antipathy  to  Judaism  led  him  to 
break  the  continuity  of  history  and  to  set 
up  a  wrathful  God  of  the  Old  Testament  in 
opposition  to  the  gracious  God  and  Father 
of  Jesus  Christ.  His  religion  therefore  be- 
came a  distorted  exaggeration  of  antitheses 
in  the  Paulinism  which  he  honestly  ad- 
mired and  heartily  believed.  To  him  Paul 
was  the  one  apostle.  His  doctrine,  how- 
ever, seems  in  reality  to  have  been  an  ultra- 
Paulinism  from  which  his  honoured  master 
would  have  instinctively  recoiled.  The 
phenomenon  of  Marcion's  appearance  in 
the  second  century  is  a  proof  that  it  has 
been  the  fate  of  Paul,  as  it  has  been  the 
fate  of  many  a  thinker  within  and  without 
the  church,  to  set  in  motion  tendencies  and 
ideas  with  which  his  name  was  linked,  but 
with  which  he  could  not  possibly  have 
brought  himself  to  sympathize. 


74 


SELECTED  LIST  OF  RECENT  WORKS 
ON  THE  CRITICISM  OF  PAUL  AND 
PAULINISM 

(a)  The  idea  of  the  Spirit :  — 

Emil  Sokolowski,  Die  Begriffe  Geist  und  Leben  bet 

Paulus  (Gottingen,  1903). 
H.  Weinel,  Die  Wirkimgen  des  Geistes  und  der  Geister 

(Freiburg  i.  B.,  1899). 
H.  GuNKEL,  Die  Wirkungen  des  heiligen   Geistes  nack 

der  pofuldren  Anschauung  der  apostolischen  Zeit 

und  der  Lehre  des  Apostels  Paulus  (Gottingen,  3d 

ed.  1909). 
J.  Arnal,  La  Notion  de  VEs^rit.  I.  La  doctrine  Paulin- 

ienne  (Paris,  1908). 
M.  Steffen,  Das  Verhdltnis  von  Geist  und  Glauben  bei 

Paulus  (in  Preuschen's  "  Zeitschrift  fiir  die  neutesta- 

mentliche  Wissenschaft,"  1901,  i-ii). 
Irving  F.  Wood,  The  Spirit  of  God  in  Biblical  Litera- 
ture, pp.  198  f.  (New  York,  1904). 
H.  W.  Robinson,  Mansfield  College  Essays,  pp.  265  f. 

(London,  1909). 

(3)  The  general  religious  ideas  of  Paul :  — 

Weizsacker,  The  Apostolic  Age,  vol.  i,  pp.  79  f.  (Lon- 
don :  Williams  and  Norgate,  1894). 

75 


SELECTED  LIST 

A.  TiTius,  Der  Paulinismus  unter  dem  Gesichtspunkt  der 
Seligkeit  (Tubingen,  1900). 

H.  Thackeray,  Relation  of  St.  Paul  to  Contemporary 
Jewish  Thought  (London,  1900). 

S.  Means,  St.  Paul  and  the  Anti-Nicene  Church  (Lon- 
don, 1903). 

M.  Friedlander,  Die  Religiosen  Beiuegungen  innerhalb 
des  Judentums  tm  Zeitalterjesu^  pp.  2^2  f.  {Berliiij 

190.5)- 
O.  Pfleiderer,  Primitive  Christianity,  vol.  i,  pp.  270  f. 

(London  :  Williams  and  Norgate,  1906). 
M.  GoGUEL,  Uapbtre  Paul  et  Jesus  Christ  (Paris,  1904). 
W.  Wrede,  Paulus  (Halle  a.  d.  S.  1904 ;  Eng.  Tr.  Lon- 
don, Philip  Green). 
H.  A.  A.  Kennedy,  St.  PauVs  Conceptions  of  the  Last 

Things  (London,  1904). 
E.  VON  DoBSCHiJTZ,  Probleme  des  afostolischen  Zeital- 

ters  (Leipzig,  1904). 
P.  Wernle,    The  Beginnings   of  Christianity.,   vol.   i, 

pp.  158  f.  (London  :  Williams  and  Norgate,  1903). 
M.  "BKycK^i^K^Die  Entstehung  der  paulinischen  ChristO' 

logie  (1903). 
A.    C.   McGiFFERT,    7';^e  Apostolic   Age.,   pp.    1 14-150 

(Scribner,  1897). 
P.  Gardner,  A  Historic  View  of  the  New   Testament, 

pp.  208  f.  (London,  popular  ed.  1904). 
Shailer  Mathews,    The  Messianic  Hope  in  the  New 

Testament,  pp.  163  f .  (Chicago,  1906). 
A.  Meyer,  Jesus  or  Paul  (Harper  Brothers,  1909). 

76 


SELECTED  LIST 

J.  Weiss,  Paul  and  Jesus  (Harper  Brothers,  1909). 

R.  Scott,  The  Pauline  Epistles  (Edinburgh  :  T.  and  T. 

Clark,  1909). 
W.  Olschewski,  Die  Wurzeln  der  pauliniscken  Christo- 

logie  (Konigsberg  i.  Pr.  1909). 


($f)e  fltberi^itie  ^tt^ii 

CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .   S    .  A 


MODERN 

RELIGIOUS 

PROBLEMS 


EDITED  BY 

DR.  AMBROSE  W.  VERNON 


For  a  long  time  there  has  been  an  atmosphere  of 
lincertainty  in  the  religious  realm.  This  uncertainty 
has  been  caused  by  the  widespread  knowledge  that 
modem  scholarship  has  modified  the  traditional  con- 
ceptions of  the  Christian  religion,  and  particularly  by 
widespread  ignorance  of  the  precise  modifications  to 
which  modem  scholarship  has  been  led. 

The  aim  of  this  series  of  books  is  to  lay  before  the 
great  body  of  intelligent  people  in  the  English-speak- 
ing world  the  precise  results  of  this  scholarship,  so 
that  men  both  within  and  without  the  churches  may 
be  able  to  understand  the  conception  of  the  Christian 
religion  (and  of  its  Sacred  Books)  which  obtains 
among  its  leading  scholars  to-day,  and  that  they  may 
intelhgently  cooperate  in  the  great  practical  problems 
with  which  the  churches  are  now  confronted. 

"While  at  many  a  point  divergent  views  are  cham> 
pioned,  it  has  become  apparent  in  the  last  few  years 
that  it  is  possible  to  speak  of  a  consensus  of  opinion 
among  the  leading  scholars  of  England  and  America, 
who  have,  in  general,  adopted  the  modem  point  of 
view. 


The  publishers  and  editor  congratulate  themselves 
that  this  consensus  of  opinion  may  be  presented  to 
the  public  not  by  middle-men,  but  by  men  who  from 
their  position  and  attainment  are  recognized  through- 
out the  English  Protestant  world  as  among  those  best 
able  to  speak  with  authority  on  the  most  important 
subjects  which  face  intelligent  religious  men  to-day. 
It  is  a  notable  sign  of  the"  times  that  these  eminent 
specialists  have  gladly  consented  to  pause  in  their  de- 
tailed research,  in  order  to  acquaint  the  religious 
public  with  the  results  of  their  study. 

Modem  Religious  Problems  are  many,  but  they 
fall  chiefly  under  one  of  the  four  divisions  into  which 
this  series  of  books  is  to  be  divided :  — 

I.   The  Old  Testament. 
II.  The  New  Testament. 

III.  Fundamental  Christian  Conceptions. 

IV.  Practical  Church  Problems. 

Under  these  four  main  divisions  the  most  vital 
problems  will  be  treated  in  short,  concise,  clear  vol- 
umes. They  will  leave  technicalities  at  one  side  and 
they  will  be  published  at  a  price  which  will  put  the 
assured  results  of  religious  scholarship  within  the 
reach  of  all. 

The  volumes  already  arranged  for  are  the  following : 

I.   OLD  TESTAMENT 

"THE    ORIGIN     AND     DEVELOPMENT    OF    THE 
LAW."     By  Canon  S.  R.  DRIVER,  Oxford  University. 

"HOW  WE  GOT  OUR  OLD  TESTAMENT." 

By  Professor  WILLIAM  R.  ARNOLD,  Andover  Semia- 
ary. 

••THE  PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  OF   ISRAEL." 

By  Professor  L.  B.  PATON,  Hartford  Theological  Semi»» 
ary. 


II.   NEW  TESTAMENT 

"THE  EARLIEST  SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OP 
JESUS."  By  Professor  F.  C.  BURKITT,  Cambridge  Uni- 
versity, England.    (Now  Ready.) 

««THE  MIRACLES  OF  JESUS." 

By  Professor  F.  C.  PORTER,  Yale  University. 

"THE  FOUNDING  OF  THE  CHURCH." 

By  Professor  B.  W.  BACON,  Yale  University.  (Now 
Ready.) 

"HOW  WE  GOT  OUR  NEW  TESTAMENT." 
By  Professor  J.  H.  ROPES,  Harvard  University. 

"PAUL  AND  PAULINISM." 

By  Rev.  JAMES  MOFFATT,  D.  D.,  Broughty  Feny, 
Forfarshire,  Scotland.   (Now  Ready.) 

"THE  HISTORICAL  AND  RELIGIOUS  VALUE  OF 
THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL."  By  Professor  E.  F.  SCOTT, 
Queen's  University,  Kingston.    (Now  Ready.) 

•'THE     BIRTH    AND     RESURRECTION     OF    OUR 
LORD."    By  Professor  WILLIAM  H.  RYDER,  of  And- 
;^      over  Seminary,  Cambridge,  Mass. 

III.   FUNDAMENTAL  CHRISTIAN 
CONCEPTIONS 

"THE  GOSPEL  OF  JESUS." 

By  Professor  G.  W.  KNOX,  Union  Theological  Seminary. 
New  York.  With  General  Introduction  to  the  Series  (Now 
Ready.) 

"THE  GOD  OF  THE  CHRISTIAN." 

By  Professor  A.  C.  McGIFFERT,  Union  Theological  Sem- 
inary. 

"SIN  AND  ITS  FORGIVENESS." 

By  President  WILLIAM  DeW.  HYDE,  Bowdoin  College. 
(Now  Ready.) 

"THE  PERSON  OF  JESUS." 

By  President  H.  C.  KING,  Oberiin  College. 

"THE  AUTHORITY  OF  THE  SCRIPTURES." 

By  Profeswr  SHAILER  MATHEWS,  UniTcrsity  of  Chi- 
cago. 


IV.   PRACTICAL  CHURCH   PROBLEMS 

"THE  PLACE  OF  THE  CHURCH  IN  MODERN 
SOCIETY."  By  WM.  JEWETT  TUCKER,  Ex-jereti- 
dent  of  Dartmouth  College. 

•♦THE  CHURCH  AND  LABOR." 

By  CHARLES  STELZLE,  Superintendent  of  Department 
of  the  Church  and  Labor  of  the  Presbyterian  Church  of  the 
United  States.    (Now  Ready.) 

"THE  ADJUSTMENT  OF  THE  "bIBLE  SCHOOLS 
TO  MODERN  NEEDS."  By  Professor  CHARLES  F. 
KENT,  Yale  University. 

••THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  CHILD." 

By  Rev.  HENRY  SLOANE  COFFIN,  Madison  At*. 
Presbyterian  Church,  New  York  City. 

"THE  PRESENTATION  OF  RELIGION  TO  EDU- 
CATED MEN."  By  Rev.  GEORGE  HODGES,  D.  D., 
Dean  o£  the  Episcopal  Theological  School,  Cambridge, 
Mass. 

The  general  editor  of  the  series,  Rev.  Ambrose 
White  Vernon,  is  a  graduate  of  Princeton  University 
<i89i)  and  of  Union  Theological  Seminary  (1894). 
After  two  years  more  of  study  in  Germany,  on  a  fel- 
lowship, he  had  an  experience  of  eight  years  in  the 
pastorate,  at  Hiawatha,  Kansas,  and  East  Orange, 
New  Jersey.  From  1904  to  1907  he  was  professor  of 
Biblical  literature  in  Dartmouth  College,  and  then 
professor  of  practical  theology  at  Yale  till  the  present 
year,  when  he  returned  to  the  pastorate,  succeeding 
the  late  Dr.  Reuen  Thomas  at  Harvard  Church, 
Brookline,  one  of  the  leading  churches  of  metropoli- 
tan Boston.  Dartmouth  College  gave  him  the  de- 
gree of  D.  D.  in  1907. 

The  volumes  are  attractively  bound  in  cloth.    Thin 
l2mo,  each  jo  cents  net.    Postage  5  cents. 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
4  Park  St.,  Boston :  85  Fifth  Ave.,  New  York 


Date  Due 


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